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At its heart, Luna is not much different from Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now, or any other cloud-gaming platform. The service streams games from high-end servers, so you don’t need the latest and greatest hardware to play them. In fact, one of the primary selling points is that you can play games on any device, including cell phones and Fire TVs. Where Luna differs is its payment structure. For comparison, Stadia has a free tier with basic service and a premium subscription with added features like 4K....

The solution to this problem was through one of two methods. The first was to refresh the display with whatever the GPU had rendered at that moment, but that caused tearing as the GPU had often only rendered a fraction of a frame by the time the display was ready to refresh. Although content on the display was recent, and mouse input was fast, tearing was unsightly and often completely ruined the on-screen picture and overall experience....

The CINEBENCH R11.5 benchmark tests both CPU and GPU performance. The Phenom II X6 1090T matched the Phenom II X4 965 for the GPU test and was considerably faster in the CPU test thanks the extra cores. Even the much lower clocked Phenom II X6 1055T beat the 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965 when measuring the CPU performance, though it was slower than the Core i7 930. Phenom II processors in general tend to struggle with WinRAR benchmarks....

The Aliens vs. Predator performance heavily favors the Radeon HD 6990 and HD 6970 Crossfire cards as the technology scales very well here. The Radeon HD 6990 was 6% slower than the HD 6970 Crossfire cards but it was also 47% faster than the HD 5970, 56% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 and 67% faster than the HD 6970.

When testing with Mass Effect 2 the Radeon HD 6990 was found to be 10% slower than a pair of Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire graphics cards. That said it was still 20% faster than the Radeon HD 5970 and 56% faster than a single HD 6970 while it also lead the GeForce GTX 580 by a 47% margin.

As expected, in the dozen games tested the R9 380X was never more than 14% faster than the R9 380 and on average was ~10% faster. The R9 380X was also about 21% slower than the R9 390 and 26% slower than the GeForce GTX 970. At $240 the R9 380X costs 20% more than the R9 380 which is a bit of a head scratcher. It’s also 20% cheaper than the R9 390, so at least that makes sense....

The R9 Fury X delivered 53fps on average when playing Metro Redux at 1600p, 9% slower than the GTX 980 Ti and R9 295X2 and just 6% faster than the GTX 980 despite crushing the R9 390X by a 23% margin. At 4K we see the margin between the Fury X and GTX 980 Ti shrink considerably as the GeForce GPU was just 3% faster. With TressFX disabled the GeForce cards race ahead in Tomb Raider and with GPUs like the GTX 980 Ti now rendering 60fps at 4K, we might have to start testing with TressFX enabled....

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is another game I didn’t have time to completely retest with more suitable settings for the RX 470. Therefore, we are stuck with the hyper quality results and this meant an average of just 39fps at 1080p for the RX 470. Even so, the RX 470 was just 3fps slower than the R9 390 and 4fps slower than the RX 480. Again we find at 1440p the RX 470 is able to outclass the GTX 970, even if it’s by a slim margin under unplayable conditions....

Before wrapping things up let’s take a quick look at a few price vs. performance scatter plots. Please note that we are just comparing CPU prices here, which doesn’t take into account additional costs like the need for a cooler with Intel’s K-series for example. This graph is quite telling, isn’t it? For those of you wondering what you’re looking at, the further right a plot is the better its performance, while the lower a plot goes the cheaper it is, which is to say that processors want to be situated as far right and as low as possible....

Jason Cross from Macworld recently looked at the broad picture including past improvements to try and predict what sort of performance we can expect from the A16. The general consensus from the rumor mill is that Apple will manufacture the A16 on a 5nm process, just like it did with the A15 and A14 before it. The A16 will likely use TSMC’s third-gen 5nm process, which will only offer a slight performance and efficiency boost....

Bloomberg reports that Apple’s relaxing of its mask rules comes a week after the company removed its mask mandate for customers at many of its retail outlets but left the requirement in place for staff. However, it does still recommend that both shoppers and employees wear masks and is providing them upon request. This isn’t the first time Apple has dropped its mask requirements. Last June, it removed them at many stores and offices but brought the rules back in July following a new wave of Covid cases....

With the release of iOS and iPadOS 15.4.1, Apple says it has addressed an issue that reduced the battery life on some devices after installing version 15.4. The latest update also includes fixes for braille and hearing devices. Even users who didn’t have problems with battery life should still install it for the security updates. Some users reported battery life on their iPhones fell by as much as 50 percent upon installing iOS 15....

UNiDAYS is a service that verifies education status and aggregates discounts that members can take advantage of. According to the company’s website, one in every three students in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are UNiDAYS members. It’s not uncommon to find discounts of around 10 percent off Macs and iPads in Apple’s education store. The savings aren’t massive, but when you are a college student, every little bit helps....

It’s an overly simplistic yet strikingly bold decision that perhaps only a company as confident and charismatic (or maybe cocky) as Apple could pull off. I personally thought it was a lazy choice when I first heard it, but now that it’s had some time to sink in, and considering some of the terrible product names already on the market (the majority of HTC smartphones, for example), it’s more like a breath of fresh air....

Similar to the ARM big.LITTLE layout, the A10 Fusion is comprised of two performance cores clocked at 2.34GHz and two energy-efficient cores that run at 1/5th the power of the performance cores. Apple says the two high-performance cores run 40 percent faster than last year’s A9, twice as fast as the A8 before it and a whopping 120 times faster than the chip powering the original iPhone. An Apple-designed performance controller determines the best cores for a given job....

I used a USB drive to install Windows since the Air doesn’t have an optical drive. I did try using an external USB drive but for some reason, the system wasn’t able to successfully read from my Windows 7 install disc. Once installed, I was able to select which OS I wanted to boot from and everything worked well. I was able to finish the majority of our benchmark tests although PCMark Vantage kept erroring out in Windows....

The Asrock DeskMini, on the other hand, only requires four screws to be removed before allowing the guts of the DeskMini to slide right out. This provides users with easy, direct access to the internal workings of the device and makes installing storage, memory or even a new CPU a breeze. This makes the DeskMini the best small form factor PC we have ever worked with in terms of ease and convenience....

Interestingly, we witnessed the first true deviation between the two chipsets in x264 HD Benchmark 3.0, with the Z68 being 3fps slower. Things returned to normal when testing with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, where Intel’s Sandy Bridge platforms completed the test in just over six seconds.

If you push on the cover hard enough it does flex, but we didn’t find this to be a problem. Asus has made critical components such as the hinge on the docking station, for example, out of steel to improve its durability. Combined, the docking station and pad measure 10.6 x 6.7 x 0.98" (271 x 171 x 25mm) and weigh roughly 2.9lb. The tablet by itself measures 10.6 x 6....

If you missed the saga as it unfolded in December, it began something like this: about a dozen users posted photos of their Z690 Heroes with the two MOSFETs above the board’s memory slots burnt-up or melted. After some head scratching on Reddit and YouTube, BuildZoid eventually figured out that the polarized capacitor that fed the MOSFETs was installed backward on some boards. In the best-case scenario, the MOSFETs or the VRMs they were connected to would fail without fanfare and prevent the board from detecting the installed memory sticks, in turn stopping it from posting, or returning an error code 53....